Arendt/Carson: Rethinking Collective Action through Environmental Politics

• In Event: Conceptions of Collectivity

Abstract

This essay aims to reconceptualize collective action in the face of climate change by putting the work of Rachel Carson and Hannah Arendt into dialogue. While Carson and Arendt were both high profile public intellectuals, and published essays in the New Yorker in close proximity to each other (excerpts from Silent Spring appeared in 1962, and Arendt’s reports on Eichmann’s trial were published in 1963), neither (as far as I know) ever mentions the work of the other. I examine this literal gap between Arendt and Carson to theorize a gap, or disjuncture, between their work, and the projects (political theory & modern environmentalism) that their work influenced and helped to spark. Specifically, I will suggest that we can find in their work a disjuncture that has largely gone untheorized in contemporary democratic and environmental political theory: a gap between the important categories in modern and contemporary political theory, especially the public/private distinction, and the environmental movement, which de-centers the public/private divide in favor of categories that foreground the importance of meaningful living in both public and private realms: for example, pitting meaningful survival against degraded survival or extinction, and a liveable world against a polluted or poisoned world. Within the purview of environmentalism, the public/private divide is less germane than the survival or non-survival, or pollution or non-pollution, of a world that allows both public and private to flourish.

Author

• Lida E. Maxwell, Boston University